In this exercise, I am going to introduce you to the Scribble effect, whichis another one of the major, terrific, super powerful, dynamic effects inside of Illustrator.I have saved my progress as Skeletal shadow.ai.I would like you if you are working along with me to go ahead and meatball ofthe skull elements layer here inside the Layers panel.If necessary press Ctrl+H or Command+H on a Mac in order to hide your selectionoutlines, then go up to the Effect menu, choose Stylize, and choose Scribble.And I should say that the various effects that are located under the Stylizesubmenu are kind of a hodge podge quite frankly.

We've got the softening effects, which include Drop Shadow, Feather, InnerGlow and Outer Glow, all of which are more than likely to get rasterized whenyou print your artwork.We've got Round Corners, which dynamically rounds off the corners of thepath outline. We have seen that way, way back in the Fundamentals portion of the series.And then we have got Scribble, which bears no relationship to any of the others.What it does is it converts the fills of your path outlines into a bunchof scribbly strokes, on-the-fly of course subject to a bunch of different parameters.So I will go ahead and choose Scribble. That brings up this mammoth dialog box right here.

And the Preview check box at least for me is turned on, so go ahead and makesure it is turned so you can see what you're doing.In this way, we can at least walk our through the predefined settings.So these Settings pop-up menu right here offers a bunch of different options,all of which contain different parameters, so they automatically enter differentnumerical values into these fields.So these are the default settings, fine.Here's Childlike. It's going to get all ultra scribbly but I think it reallylooks so much childish as just absolutely outrageous.

And some of these are going to work better on much bigger artwork, so when weoriginally saw his pirate flag, last time we saw it back in the advanced portionof the series, it ended up measuring 5 feet wide by 3 feet tall.Well, I've since scaled it back down to a more reasonable size. I think it'ssomething like 13 inches wide right now.But if you were working with a very large piece of artwork like the originalpirate flag, why then you would see very different effects because you wouldbe so far zoomed out from your artwork.Anyway, here is Dense.It goes ahead in sort of piles and a denser stroke.

And everything, we are going to have to wait for a couple of progress bars to zip by.All right, so you can go ahead and wander your way through the settings there.I am going to tell you how these various numerical options work very briefly.The Angle value is controlling the angle of the scribbled lines. I thinkthat's pretty obvious.We've got a Path Overlap, which means imagine that every single one of theselittle scribbles here, that's a single path outline, because that's whatIllustrator is doing in the background.Well, by how much do you want those paths to overlap each other?If you want to get really loopy, let me show you that one.I will go ahead and choose this one called Snarl here and in a case of Snarl wehave a lot of path overlap going on because even though the base path overlapvalue is set to 0, so there is strictly speaking no path overlap.

We've got a variation of 10 points, so that means that's a random variation bythe way, which means that the paths can overlap each other by as much as 10points in either direction.So that's a pretty heavy-duty effect right there.Now Line Options, these control the nature of the strokes, these strokes thatare applied to these Path outlines.And the Stroke Width value is of course, that's your line weight.Then we have got Curviness. What that means, right there at the corner where thepath has to loop back around in order to create the scribble, how muchcurviness do you want?If you want it to be nice and angular, you just take that curvy value down.

Now I've also got some random variations, so we are not going to get absolutecorners but we sometimes have corners as you can see.At any time that you want an element of random variation then you just go aheadand increase these Variation values.Each one of the Variation values, bear in mind, is associated with the mainoption over here on the left hand side.Next, we have Spacing, how much space do you want between your strokes and youcan space your strokes loose from each other or tight from each other and youhave variation control there as well.Now I have managed to make an absolute mess of everything.

Here is what I urge you to do.Go up to the Settings menu and choose Tight, that's a good place to start wherethe specific effect is concerned.Notice that there's a couple of areas in which you do not have random variationcontrol, and that is with Angle.So your Angle is always going to be one and only one angle, whatever you dial inhere, and the same with the Line Width. It's going to be consistent as well.Both of those things, I think are insane.The two things, I would first and foremost want variation control over are Angleand Line Width, Stroke Width right here. But alas,they are not available.

Anyway, I am going to change the Angle value to 0 and I am going to leave boththe Path Overlap and Variation values set to 0 as well.The Stroke Width is 1, the Curviness value is 0, which means we're going to getcorner transitions as we scribble back and forth.The Variation is 0, so no random variation going on.I am going to take the Space value, just to loosen things up a little.I am going to take that up to 2 points and then I am going to take the Variationvalue up to one point and press the Tab key in order to invoke the preview andthat is the effect I'm looking for.Now unfortunately you can't save out these settings as a preset here in theSettings pop-up menu. That's just not an option.

I will show you how you can save your Affects Settings as graphic styles,that's coming up soon.But in the meantime, go ahead and click the OK button in order to apply that effect.All right, so that's how the Scribble effect works.In the next exercise, I am going to show you how we can use it in order toestablish stylistic consistency throughout this artwork.

Resume Transcript Auto-Scroll

Author

Released

1/28/2011

In Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Mastery, the third and final part of the comprehensive Illustrator One-on-One series, author and industry expert Deke McClelland shows how to take advantage of the wide array of dynamic effects in Illustrator CS5. Deke explores Illustrator’s powerful Gradient Mesh feature, great for creating photorealistic airbrushing effects. He also covers graphic styles, the liquify tools, envelope-style distortions, the new Bristle Brushes, 3D text, and perspective drawing. Exercise files accompany the course.